The Letters of William Gilmore Simms. Vol. 2

Correspondence | U of South Carolina P | 1953

In his lifetime, William Gilmore Simms “was the author of thirty-four works of fiction,
nineteen volumes of poetry, three of drama, three anthologies, three volumes of
history, two of geography, six of biography, and twelve of reviews,
miscellanies and addresses, a total of eighty-two volumes.”[1]The estimate of the output was impressive, if not quite complete.[2]Regardless, Simms’s influence was unparalleled. No
mid-nineteenth-century writer and editor did more to frame white southern
self-identity and nationalism, shape southern historical consciousness, or
foster the South's participation and recognition in the broader American
literary culture. No southern writer had more contemporary esteem and
attention, at least after Edgar Allan Poe moved north. Among American romancers
(or writers of prose epics), only New Yorker James Fenimore Cooper was as
successful by the 1840s. In those same years, Simms was the South's most
influential editor of cultural journals. He also was the region's most prolific
cultural journalist and poet, publishing an average of a book review and a poem
per week for forty-five years. By any standard, Simms’s literary
production was remarkable. Even if one were to consider only those
works that represent the author’s highest creative attainments, the subset
would still dwarf the total corpus of almost any other writer of Simms’s
day. Then there are the letters. As Donald Davidson notes, with
the publication of The Letters of William Gilmore Simms, any
imagined collection of “the major achievement of Simms the artist must be
increased.” After all, “aside from
their great intrinsic value and notable interest as human documents, the
letters of Simms open the way to a new and rich knowledge of the man and his
times.”[3]This is no insignificant accomplishment, given the expanse of the
author’s influence and life.

Decorating the covers of all six volumes of Letters is
the author’s personal emblem, from a design that graced the signet ring he
wore, and the accompanying motto, Video Volans – literally “I
see soaring.”[4] It
is a fitting symbol, for in his letters Simms revealed most dramatically the
telescopic vision that informed his fictional and non-fictional writing. For
their variety, their information, their insight, and their entertainment value,
these letters are unparalleled in nineteenth-century epistolary culture. Spanning
almost 40 years, from July 1830 to May 1870, the more than 1,500 letters
collected into these volumes offer a comprehensive view of the antebellum
South’s leading man of letters, fixing him “intimately into his place in the
literary America of his day and presenting his off-the-record views of
virtually every important phase of our national existence.”[5] Though only a fraction of his total
correspondence, the letters that survive chronicle almost the entirety of his
professional life, from the time he was 21 years old to three weeks before his
death at age 64. Many of his correspondents are not represented, but
over 300 are. Among them are famous writers, editors, publishers,
and others in the literary worlds of the North and South; politicians,
statesmen, soldiers, and other shapers of antebellum policy; not to mention
literary societies, colleges, newspapers, and other organizations of
contemporary culture. The scope is vast, and thus offers a rich
repository for the historian, the political scientist, and the literary scholar
alike. John C. Guilds maintains that, because Simms’s correspondence
covers such a “wide range of American politics, economics, and philosophy as
well as literature and publishing, his letters have national implications and
importance. They are in effect a cornucopia of Americana.”[6]

Simms’s
letters are the best documentary source for tracing the author’s career as a
writer. They show the composition and publication histories of most
of his major and minor works. They also effectively reveal aspects
of his writing process, including “the principles which guided him in his
unimpeachable use of historical data, his sensitiveness to language, the care
and study which resulted in his command of the colloquial, and the thorough
knowledge of his people and their traits, upon which realism his published work
is based”[7] Furthermore, Simms was an
opinionated and involved commentator on the politics and cultural changes of
his day. In a direct and unequivocal tone largely absent in his
fiction and in an impulsive and candid style unsuitable for his non-fiction,
Simms’s letters demonstrate the author’s interpretation of most of antebellum
America’s key events. Noted southern literary scholar Louis D. Rubin
remarked that nobody “who writes about the period in any depth can do it
without consulting [Simms’s] letters….They constitute the most important single
document in the study of antebellum Southern cultural life.” In
fact, the letters are “essential not only for matters involving Simms but
almost anything having to do with Southern literature, intellectual and
political life during those key years when [the] fateful identity of the region
was being established.”[8]

The editing and compilation
of Simms’s letters began in the late 1930s as a collaboration between the
author’s granddaughter, Mary C. Simms Oliphant, and Furman University English
professor Alfred Taylor Odell. Following Odell’s untimely death in
1948, Oliphant recruited T.C. Duncan Eaves of the English department at the
University of Arkansas to shepherd the volumes through to their
completion. Enough work was completed in the eleven years from the
launch of the editing project to his death that Odell is still credited as a
co-editor on the first five volumes, despite the first of these not appearing
in print until years after his demise. The first five volumes
appeared one per year beginning in 1952, all from the University of South
Carolina Press. The sixth volume of the Letters, which
features correspondence collected after the issue of the first series, was
published in 1982. Unlike the first five volumes, which present the
letters chronologically in distinct historical segments[9], Volume 6 spans the author’s full life
and gathers missing communications throughout the other volumes. A
revised and expanded edition of Volume 6, also from the University of South
Carolina Press, was published in 2012 and includes nearly 70 more recently
discovered Simms documents.

Todd Hagstette

[1]A.S. Salley in his biographical essay in volume
1 ofThe Letters of William Gilmore Simms(Columbia: University of South Carolina
Press, 1952), lxxii.

[2]Since Salley, the mid-twentieth century’s most
accomplished collector of Simmsiana, made his estimate in 1951, more Simms
works have been discovered.

[8]Quoted from a personal letter to the editor in
John Caldwell Guilds,“Long Years of Neglect”:
The Work and Reputation of William Gilmore Simms (Fayetteville: The University of
Arkansas Press, 1988), xi.